Link Building

Links on the Internet form a relationship between pages and sites that are hugely important to both search engines and marketers. Search engines, like Google, use links to crawl the web, discover new pages, calculate the popularity of those pages, and also determine the relevancy of results to a searcher's query.

While link building can be hugely beneficial for SEO, it's important to stay up-to-date on the latest practices. Below you'll find the most recent posts from the Moz Blog. In addition, we've selected a few quality resources that deserve particular attention.

A relationship-based approach to link building can be so powerful. By connecting with site owners on a personal level, you can start creating a positive association between you and the content you share. Start thinking of a link as something that's given online by a real live person who also exists outside the internet, and you can move from being a link builder to being a relationship builder. Plus, you might make a friend.

For years, we've heard the drumbeat that marketers should stop focusing on links. While it's certainly true that marketers should avoid manipulative link building, the popular narrative would have us believe that external links aren't important in Google's ranking algorithms, and that link building can be safely ignored. Is there any truth to this? Does data support the notion that you can successfully rank in Google search results without links?

Since releasing the Spam Score feature in Open Site Explorer this week, a number of questions have come up about what it is and how to use it. In today's Whiteboard Friday, Rand takes the opportunity to clarify the answers to those questions.

We've just launched social accounts and contact data inside Open Site Explorer (initially in two sections), to help with link prospecting, analysis, and outreach. Discover more about how to use the feature and where to find it.

How do you decide what's a good link and what isn't? In today's Whiteboard Friday, Rand looks at whether on- and off-topic links are more powerful and what else you should be looking for when building a link.